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sure all is among such a company of perverse and self-willed spirits,) there every one must be supposed to be, so far as he is able, a fury and a devil to every one; and those that do compel are like so many salvage tyrants, continually vexed and enraged with stubborn oppositions and resistances, and those that are compelled, like so many obstinate galley-slaves, are continually lashed into an insufferable obedience, and forced by one torment to submit to another; and thus all their society with one another is a perpetual intercourse of mutual outrage and violence.

This being therefore the miserable fate and issue of a perverse, and stubborn, and untractable temper, the gospel, whose great design is to direct us to our happiness, doth industriously endeavour to root it out of our minds, and to plant in its room a gentle, obsequious, and condescending disposition: for hither tend all those evangelical precepts, which require us to become weak to the weak, that we may gain them, 1 Cor. ix. 22. to bear with their infirmities, Rom. xv. 2. and support them, and be patient towards them, 1 Thess. v. 14. And on the other hand, to submit ourselves to our elders, 1 Pet. v. 5. and to those that have the rule over us, Heb. xiii. 17. to obey our magistrates, our parents, and our masters, to be subject to principalities, and not speak evil of dignities, to honour kings, and submit to their laws and governors, 1 Pet. ii. 13, 14. 1 Pet. ii. 13, 14. In a word, to honour all men as they deserve, 1 Pet. ii. 17. and to hold good men in reputation, Phil. ii. 29. and in honour to prefer one another, Rom. xii. 10. The sense of all which is, to oblige us to treat all men as becomes us in the rank and station we are placed in ; to honour those that are our superiors, whether in

place or virtue; to give that modest deference to their judgments, that reverence to their persons, that respect to their virtues, and homage to their desires or commands, which the degree or kind of their superiority requires; to condescend to those that are our inferiors, and treat them with all that candour and ingenuity, sweetness and affability, that the respective distances of our state will allow; to consult their conveniencies, and do them all good offices, and pity and bear with their infirmities, so far as they are safely and wisely tolerable. By the constant practice of which, our minds will be gradually cured of all that perverseness and surliness of temper, which indisposes us to the respective duties of our relations; of all that contempt and selfishness which renders us averse to the proper duty of superiors, and of all that self-conceit and impatience of command, which indisposes us to the duty of inferiors. And our wills being once wrought into an easy pliableness, either to submission or condescension, we are in a forward preparation of mind to live under the government of heaven, where doubtless under God, the supreme lord and sovereign, there are numberless degrees of superiority and inferiority. For some are said to reap sparingly, and some abundantly; some to be rulers of five cities, and some of ten; some to be the least, and some the greatest in the kingdom of heaven: all which implies, that in that blessed state there is a great variety of degrees of glory and advancement. And indeed it cannot be otherwise in the nature of the thing; for our happiness consisting in the perfection of our natures, the more or less perfect we are, the more or less happy we must necessarily be; for

every farther degree of goodness we attain to, is a widening and enlargement of our souls for farther degrees of glory and beatitude. And accordingly when we arrive at heaven, which is the element of beatitude, we shall all be filled according to the content and measure of our capacities, and drink in more or less of its rivers of pleasure, as we are more or less enlarged to contain them. So that according as we do more and more improve ourselves in true goodness, we do naturally make more and more room in our souls for heaven, which doth always fill the vessels of glory of all sizes, and pour in happiness upon them till they all overflow and can contain no more. Since therefore they are all of them entirely resigned to and guided by right reason, there is no doubt but in these their different degrees of glory and dignity they mutually behave themselves towards one another as is most fit and becoming; and that since under God, the head and king of their society, there is from the highest to the lowest a most exact and regular subordination of members, they do every one perform their parts and duties towards every one, in all those different stations of glory they are placed in, and consequently do submit and condescend to each other, according as they are of a superior or inferior class and order. So that if when we go from hence into the other world we carry along with us a submissive and condescending frame of spirit, we shall be trained up, and predisposed to live under the blessed hierarchy of heaven; to yield a cheerful conformity to the laws and customs of it; and to render all the honours to those above, and all the condescensions to those beneath us in glory, which the statutes of that

heavenly regiment do require; in doing whereof we shall all of us enjoy a most unspeakable content and felicity. For though in the kingdom of heaven, as well as the kingdoms of the earth, there are numberless degrees of advancement and dignity, and one star there, as well as here, differeth from another star in glory; yet so freely and cheerfully do they all condescend and submit to each other, in these their respective differences of rank and station, that in the widest distances of their state and degrees of glory they all maintain the dearest intimacies and familiarities with each other, and neither those that are superior are either envied for their height or contemned for their familiarity, nor those that are inferior despised for their meanness or oppressed for their weakness. For in that blessed state, every one being best pleased with what best becomes him, it is every one's joy to behave himself towards every one as best becomes the rank and degree he is placed in; and those that are above do glory in condescending to those that are below them; and those that are below do triumph in submitting to those that are above them: and thus in all those differences of glory and dignity between them, they alternately reverence their superiors and condescend to their inferiors with the same unforced freedom and alacrity, and so do eternally converse with one another (notwithstanding all their distances) with the greatest freedom and most endearing familiarity.

And thus I have endeavoured to give you an account of the first sort of means by which heaven, the great end of a Christian, is to be obtained; viz. the proximate and immediate ones, which compre

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hend the practice of all those virtues, which, as rational creatures related to God and one another, we stand eternally obliged to; and shewed how they are all of them essential parts of the Christian life, and how heaven itself consists in the perfection of them.

So that upon the whole, the best definition I can give of the state of heaven is this, That it is the everlasting, perfect exercise of all those human, divine, and social virtues, which as rational animals, related to God and all his rational creation, we are indispensably and everlastingly obliged to. to. And therefore, since the only natural way by which we can acquire and perfect these virtues is use and practice, it hence necessarily follows, that the practice of them is the only direct and immediate means by which that heavenly state is to be purchased and obtained.

SECT. IV.

Wherein, for a conclusion of this chapter, some motives and considerations are proposed, to persuade men to the practice of these heavenly virtues.

IT having been largely shewed in the foregoing sections, that the practice of all those virtues which are included in the heavenly part of the Christian life tends directly towards the heavenly state, and naturally grows up into it, I shall now briefly conclude this argument with some motives to persuade men to the practice of them. And these I shall deduce,

1. From the suitableness of them to our present state and relation.

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